Video surveillance systems are used in a variety of applications for monitoring objects within an environment. In security applications, for example, such systems are sometimes employed to track individuals or vehicles entering or leaving a building facility or security gate, or to monitor individuals within a store, office building, hospital, or other such setting where the health and/or safety of the occupants may be of concern. In the aviation industry, for example, such systems have been used to monitor the presence of individuals at key locations within an airport such as at a security gate or parking garage.
In certain applications, the video surveillance system may be tasked to record video image data for later use in determining the occurrence of a particular event. In forensic investigations, for example, it is common to task one or more video cameras within the system to indiscriminately record entire video clips that can later be analyzed to detect the occurrence of an event such as a robbery or theft. Such video images are typically stored as either analog video streams or as digital image data on a hard drive, optical drive, videocassette recorder (VCR), or other suitable storage means.
To permit prompt action to be taken upon the occurrence of an event, it is sometimes desirable to bind portions of the video sequence into a “package” containing the event, and then transmit such package to an external agent for further analysis. In certain security applications, for example, it may be desirable for a security guard to record a video clip containing facial images of an individual, and then transmit such video clip to another agent (e.g. a facial image database) for further analysis. To accomplish this task, many systems require the operator to manually scan the entire video stream until the desired event is found. In some cases, the system may require the operator to determine the time and/or date of the event as well as the particular camera or cameras used to detect the event. The lack of an automated means for providing video clips directly to an operator can thus result in increased search times and slower response times.